Low budgets may be way forward for British films

Two acclaimed new movies from director Danny Boyle suggested an alternative approach for British film-making when they screened this week at the Edinburgh Film Festival. Strumpet and Vacuuming Completely Nude in Paradise, both shot for television on low-cost DV, signal a move back to basics for the director of The Beach.

Later, a panel discussion on low-budget film-making held Boyle's work up as a possible solution to rising production costs. "A lot of what goes on in UK production is driven at times by the illusion that we are up there with the US," said Owen Thomas of Elemental Films. "It's increasingly apparent that our £4m budget in the UK is not £4m because that money needs to be spent but because they're often packed with wastage because [producers] are not rethinking how things can be done."

A report on Screendaily points to Boyle's films, Elemental's One Life Stand and Bille Eltringham's upcoming This is Not a Love Song as examples of a new breed of British movie, shot cheaply on DV with a skeleton crew and edited on a home computer.

Meanwhile, at the same panel discussion, Paul Trijbits, the head of the Film Council's New Cinema Fund, bemoaned the surfeit of British gangster films which, he said "aren't particularly interested" in reflecting British culture. "In almost every European country - and, for that matter, the US - independent cinema is portraying certain parts of the culture and we do that very little," claimed Trijbits. "There is an enormous amount of derivative material."